FOR RELEASE: Thursday, October 16, 2008
College Building Partnerships with School Counselors
Photos by Tahnee Bowen
Tara Elzer, a counselor at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville, discussed changes to the mandatory student services plan for counselors, new expectations for requirements for counselors and new legislative bills that affect counselors.
Sheri L. Neil, a counselor in the Springdale School District, helped to organize the meeting with Kristin Higgins, assistant professor of counselor education.
Counselors listen during one of the sessions.
Their students deal with cyber bullying, conflict about sexual identity, fear of gang activity, pressure to perform well on benchmark tests and anxiety caused by having a family member in Iraq -- and that's in middle school.
About 120 school counselors from the area met Oct. 3 on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville for an all-day professional development meeting. Kristin Higgins, assistant professor of counselor education in the College of Education and Health Professions, worked with Sheri L. Neil, a counselor in the Springdale School District, to coordinate the meeting.
"It's both that anxiety levels are increasing and it's younger kids who are feeling that anxiety," said one counselor during a session Higgins facilitated. She gathered all the middle school counselors into a classroom.
"We would like to know what issues you are facing in your schools," Higgins said in opening the session. "What information do you need that we might be able to provide? What can we work on with you?"
The elementary school counselors and the high school counselors were taking part in similar sessions with Higgins' doctoral students in other rooms in the Graduate Education Building. Each room had large sheets of paper taped to the wall so that a recorder could make a list of the counselors' concerns. Discussion continued during lunch with all the posters displayed for the group when the counselors reconvened as a whole.
School counselors are charged with serving all students at their schools, Higgins explained. They must provide guidance and information to meet students' academic, social, emotional and career planning needs. The counselors received 5.5 hours of professional development credit for attending the fall conference of the region's school counselors association.
The counselors in Higgins' breakout session said they also talk with students who cut themselves to deal with their anxiety and with students who have eating disorders. They interact with parents on both extremes of the spectrum, they said, those who are obsessed with their children's achievements and those who exhibit apathy and expect the school to handle their children's problems.
"So, you have parents who don't seem to understand their children need to learn how to cope with difficulty, how to accept natural consequences?" Higgins said.
A high level of mobility among schools can make it difficult for students to adjust as they are uprooted from year to year, another counselor said. One said some students expect to go through the school day without the slightest adversity.
"I had a girl come to me and tell me she had been called a hypocrite," one counselor said. "I had to try not to be amused when I told her, 'Well, we all can be hypocrites at times. That's not something to get upset about.'"
Covering topics including mandated reporting of child abuse and other crimes against children were members of a panel, from left, Ken Hoffman, investigations supervisor for the Arkansas Department of Human Services; David Williams, a detective with the Fayetteville Police Department; Casey Springer, a child advocate at the Children's Safety Center in Springdale; and Tara Stephenson, a deputy prosecutor with the Washington County Prosecutor's Office.
Higgins said the counselors may be seeing some of the effect of the millennial generation on their students.
"We have some kids nowadays who think everything should be easy for them, they have the helicopter parents who step in at the least motivation, it sounds like," she said. "In some ways, this is a generation of students we have to approach differently."
Some of the problems the counselors discussed, such as cyber bulling, focused on new technology that has changed students' lives, while others, such as worry about the national economic crisis and how it affects their families, were keyed to current events.
"We have hungry kids, kids who don't know where they're going to spend the night," said a Springdale counselor.
A counselor in Benton County expressed frustration that absenteeism was not taken seriously.
Some counselors said they had seen students do better in a new school configuration, such as when fewer age levels are contained in the same building or when class sizes are smaller.
Others said parents were including children too frequently in what should be adult discussions about topics such as finances or child custody. They said television watching and Internet use were not filtered sufficiently.
"Would you say we're not giving students enough time to process the complex issues they are exposed to?" Higgins asked. "We are interested in ideas you can give us for classroom teachers, too, to help them address things that cause anxiety for students."
Higgins briefly discussed a project last year in which counselor education students spent time with eighth-grade boys in West Fork in a program designed to improve their academic performance.
"These boys were not motivated, but they had the ability to do well," according to Higgins. "We got positive results and it was a great experience for the doctoral students. We would like to do more intervention programs like that. We don't want a disconnect between the research we're doing at the university and what those of you working in the trenches are seeing."
Another session that day featured Tara Elzer, a counselor at Woodland Junior High in Fayetteville, who discussed changes to the mandatory student services plan for counselors, new expectations for requirements for counselors and new legislative bills that affect counselors.
After lunch provided by the college, representatives of the nonprofit Children's Safety Center based in the JTL Shop in Springdale, the Arkansas Department of Human Services, the Fayetteville Police Department and the Washington County Prosecutor's Office covered topics that include mandated reporting of child abuse and other crimes against children and other responsibilities of counselors in the areas of drug use, abuse and addiction.